Carolyn Bessette Meets JFK Jr.

Love Story
Pilot / The Pools Party / America’s Widow
Season 1
Episodes 1 – 3
Editor’s Rating
Ryan Murphy’s Love Story is here to canonize the ’90s’ most iconic couple — and the “corseted” demands of the Kennedy family tree.
Photo: FX
The inaugural season of Ryan Murphy’s new anthology series, Love Story, chronicles the much-publicized romance between Carolyn Bessette and John F. Kennedy Jr. Its first episode concludes with a conversation between John (played by newcomer Paul Anthony Kelly) and his mother, Jackie Kennedy Onassis (frequent Murphy collaborator Naomi Watts). A few days prior, Jackie had turned the car around on the way to Ted Kennedy Jr.’s wedding upon learning that John was bringing, as his date, the actress Daryl Hannah (Dree Hemingway), his on-and-off girlfriend of several years. Now, to make matters worse, Daryl wants to marry John. Jackie is unhappy enough about the prospect to pull “stunts” like refusing to be in the same room as Daryl or turning what should be a pleasant family lunch into a symposium on who John should date.
Being Jackie, though, she never raises her mellifluous, Atlantic-accented voice, even while reprimanding her son. “Only one of us knows what it’s like to marry into this family,” she reminds him. “There isn’t enough exposure in the world to prepare a woman to be your wife.” A marriage to a Kennedy is not a partnership but a trade-off: Any woman who agrees to marry John will have to orbit him, give her life for his. The right one will not only be okay with that but relish the opportunity. Most of all, she will love him “in spite” of who he is. It’s a tall order. You could even say that, according to these parameters, the right woman for John-John — as he was affectionately known — doesn’t exist. To her endless disappointment, Jackie cannot be reborn or re-created.
Over Jackie’s description of the pressures of marrying a Kennedy, we see Carolyn Bessette (Sarah Pidgeon) enjoying her single freedom. She’s out dancing at a club with her friends after a day of crushing at her job. The tension between the self-denying demands of being a Kennedy wife and Carolyn’s assured self-determination sets the framework for this love story. Carolyn is not given to fawning or ass-kissing — only hours before meeting John, Carolyn advises her friend that the best way to get a guy’s attention is to ignore him. She doesn’t exactly seem like a woman who’d be happy to sacrifice her life for her husband’s.
One of the most iconic couples of the 1990s, Carolyn and John’s place in Kennedy history was canonized by their untimely death by plane crash in 1999. I imagine the prospect of a story this glamorous and tragic makes Murphy salivate, so naturally, Love Story opens on the tarmac. John is about to fly Carolyn and her sister Lauren (Sydney Lemmon) to Martha’s Vineyard in his Piper Saratoga to attend a Kennedy wedding. Things aren’t so good between John and Carolyn: She resents the never-ending family functions, which force her to adopt a more corseted persona. Getting a manicure before going to the airport, she switches from a Carolyn-esque cherry red to a Kennedy-pleasing neutral while the paparazzi mob outside.
We flash back to seven years earlier, before John and Carolyn met, when she was less blonde. John has just flunked the bar for the second time, and his job at the DA’s office — which has a three-strike policy — is in peril. Carolyn, by contrast, is only getting better at her job. She is living such a glitzy life you expect “Suddenly I See,” by KT Tunstall, to start playing. Carolyn is so skinny and tall and has Parliaments for breakfast. She stays up all night and still looks beautiful for work in the morning, though it doesn’t take her more than three minutes to get dressed in a neat, elegant outfit. The showroom at Calvin Klein, where she landed after working her way up from “folding sweaters at the mall,” is “a prison.” It doesn’t even take her that much effort to impress Calvin Klein (Alessandro Nivola) himself. Despite the bitchiness of her lower-level boss, Tanya, she is bold enough to challenge Calvin and suggest Annette Bening wear a suit rather than a dress to the Bugsy premiere.
So while Carolyn charges through life with confidence, John grasps at straws. He knows his future is not in the law, and whatever favor he has curried with the public by being the kind of guy who invites the paparazzi to play touch football with his friends in the park can’t float him forever. It’s in this context that they meet at a fundraiser. Carolyn sneaks in through the back door, not that anyone would be able to tell from the way she commands her interaction with John. They are introduced by Calvin, and she refuses to give him her number: If he’s interested, he knows where she works. As established earlier, this is Carolyn’s way of handling men. A sweet himbo named Michael (Noah Fearnley) — nicknamed “sexy doorman” by Carolyn’s friends — is hopelessly smitten, following her home even after she tells him that if he can’t “keep things casual and cool,” they should just be friends.
Of course, John is bewitched. Later, his cousin Anthony Radziwill (Erich Bergen) will tell him that he has never known John to have to “woo” anyone. Attempting to do just that, John shows up at the Calvin Klein office to ask Carolyn to fit him for a new suit. He convinces her to have dinner with him, but, still unused to having to work for a woman’s attention, he is late to meet her at Panna II. She’s leaving by the time he gets there, but he charms her into staying. Carolyn disarms him by being unflinching in the face of his Kennedy-ness, though maybe it’s the fact that she calls the reviled tabloids “cheap and pathetic” that wins him over. The date goes well enough for Carolyn to be pissed when she sees a picture of John and Daryl Hannah at Teddy Jr.’s wedding on the front page of the New York Post.
Let us turn our attention to Daryl for a moment. As Carolyn’s “rival” for John’s affection, her portrayal borders on caricature; Dree Hemingway does what she can, but the character is thinly written. Despite being constantly rebuffed by John, Daryl is willing to play ball with the paparazzi and give herself over to the role of Wife Hopeful. Things come to a head in episode two, when John gets home to strangers doing lines of cocaine off a “family heirloom” silver tray. The overall implication is that Jackie opposes their relationship not because of anything Daryl does — if anything, she’s overly supportive, happy to read the fact that her “work is drying up” as a sign that the universe is “making space” for them — but because she is so … ditzy. Or maybe Daryl is right, and Jackie has a vendetta against “famous blonde actresses.” Either way, it’s after Jackie refuses to come to the dinner table because Daryl is there that their relationship blows apart. Daryl can see the problems plaguing their relationship clearly, but she keeps coming back to him. Not even the fact that John is responsible for her dog Hank’s death (!) can keep her away long enough. In the shocking moment that closes “The Pools Party,” Hank’s leash slips from John’s hand; Hank runs into the middle of the street and is fatally run over by a car. Thirty years after the event, “Page Six” reported that John was angry at Daryl for “making him” fly to L.A. to attend poor Hank’s funeral when his mother’s health was in decline.
The progress of Jackie’s non-Hodgkin lymphoma becomes an important story line through episodes two and three. Carolyn rises through the ranks of Calvin Klein’s publicity department, indifferent to the red roses and “It’s not what you think” cards John keeps sending to her office in the aftermath of his publicized reunion with Daryl. Meanwhile, Jackie finds herself in the hospital after falling from a horse. Her doctor wants to observe her, but she refuses, maintaining that she only needs a good night’s sleep. John has finally passed the bar, but rather than settle down at the DA’s office, he’s rallying his efforts to get George magazine off the ground. John wants to create a magazine that treats politics like pop culture, banking on his ability to move seamlessly between the two worlds. But his suited-up investors don’t get why Cindy Crawford is dressed as a “pilgrim” (she’s supposed to be “an officer for the Continental Army,” John corrects) on the cover. Wouldn’t it be better to get, say, Daryl Hannah in a mermaid suit?
Jackie disapproves of John’s attempt to join an industry that has profited from their misfortune for decades. As they talk about it in the hospital, we learn that two years have gone by between this moment — ten-ish minutes into the second episode — and the first episode. “I’m 33 years old,” John groans, in contrast to “I’m 31 years old” in the pilot. Jackie, in any case, is not holding out for George or even, really, her son. When John rattles off the accomplishments his father had achieved by the time he was 33 — war hero, congressman, published author — she replies that “success isn’t all that triumphant when it’s expected of you.” The subtext: Why should John try to make his own mark when the family would be perfectly happy with him being the Hunk Who Passed the Bar? John wants to shed the “albatross of his name,” as Jackie puts it, but he’s not sure how.
John and Carolyn meet again at the launch party for a photography book “by” Kelly Klein (Leila George), Calvin’s wife and Carolyn’s friend (she “curated” the photos, in Carolyn’s generous words). John tries to rekindle their spark, but Carolyn reminds him that not only does he have a girlfriend, but they would never work out anyway. They live in two different worlds: There’s his and there’s hers, which she “inhabits with everyone else.” Later, Kelly warns Carolyn to be careful getting involved with such “shiny people.” Her counsel is that it’s better to be loved than to love.
You know who loves Carolyn? Sexy doorman. Their relationship deepens: She decks him out in Calvin Klein and pushes his headshot through to Calvin’s desk, successfully getting him a billboard downtown. Calvin Klein was looking for someone to replace the racist, homophobic, misogynistic “Marky Mark” as the male face of the brand. At this point, Calvin trusts Carolyn with finding ambassadors — she was the one who pulled Kate Moss’s headshot from the reject pile on his desk — though he’s happy to take the credit for “discovering” Moss. Carolyn opens up to Michael a little, but retreats from explicit affection. The next time she sees John, she’s out to lunch with Michael. John has started sending her white orchids instead of red roses because that’s the only kind Calvin allows in the office. Carolyn tells John she’s thinking about his mom.
Jackie’s condition has worsened, but it doesn’t keep her from not-so-subtly discouraging her son. “There are so many doors open to you,” she advises. “You don’t have to run through one just to say you can.” Watts plays Jackie according to the familiar beats: She is poised but brittle, a contained force. Kelly, on the other hand, plays John like he’s … dumb. He is seemingly too dense to understand the gloved condescensions his mother passes on to him. We love you anyway, you poor, dumb thing, she says, and John is like, Thanks so much. Maybe John-John was a vacuous jock type, but even hunks have souls. Kelly’s John, mostly a passive receiver of wisdom and judgment, feels disturbingly like a moving photograph.
It doesn’t help that the writing, particularly in the interactions between John and Jackie, is almost unbearably rote. The most interesting thing Jackie says comes when she’s burning her private correspondence, anticipating the interest that will surge after her passing. She tells her son that she always coveted the extraordinariness of her life, even more than Jack, who would have been content to sail and write. But the dialogue loops back to pedantic discussion of “the public” before Jackie’s desire for recognition can be developed. It’s so tempting to gloss over Jackie’s complexity in favor of an image of tortured grief that Murphy and Hines have Watts stumble as she sways to the sound of Camelot, just like Natalie Portman did in Pablo Larraín’s 2016 film, Jackie.
In any case, John is taken with Carolyn’s clear-sightedness. Meeting with her in Washington Square Park at night, his mind is blown by Carolyn’s down-to-earth assessment of his mother’s determination to protect her child. “There’s no greater force on earth than that of a single mom,” she tells him, then admits her father “failed a lot of people.” This is the second time Carolyn alludes to having had a troubled relationship with her father. John walks her home and they almost kiss, but Carolyn won’t give him the satisfaction just yet.
A long series of sequences depicting Jackie’s decline follows. She puts on lipstick as her doctor tells her that her cancer has spread to her brain. She asks for a priest to come by so she can be lucid for her last rites, during which she asks forgiveness for her sins and also forgives God. In her final moments, she counts on the reassuring presence of her longtime friend and personal secretary Nancy Tuckerman and dies while stroking John’s head. It’s all heavy-handed, and as John confirms his mother’s passing to the press that has gathered in front of their building, I thought surely some part of him and Caroline (Kennedy, played by a sharp Grace Gummer) felt moved by the outpour of affection for their mother. This depiction of the Kennedys might have been more incisive if it considered the satisfactions, however troubled, they may have gotten from their position. The best part of the wake sequence is when Caroline and John reminisce about the mundane, like when Caroline got in trouble for having a weed plant at Hyannis Port. It’s a relief when they talk about anything that’s not “the public,” the tabloids, or the pressures of being themselves.
Daryl, that troublemaker, shows up at the wake. Living up to Jackie’s worst assumptions at last, she makes it all about her. When John steps out on the balcony to wave at the crowd below, she follows him outside and holds his hand, opportunistically making sure they are seen together during a hard time. Thankfully, that’s not shown on TV — Carolyn is watching, and Ted Kennedy’s eulogy moves her to tears. “No one we knew ever had a better sense of self,” he says about Jackie, though he might as well be describing Carolyn. After it’s all over, John bikes to Carolyn’s place in the rain, freaking out. She holds him and pinches him in order to steady his breath, like she told Michael she used to do as a kid. When he kisses her, she pushes him away. But then she kisses him back … on her own terms.
• I appreciate the fact that we are getting to know John and Carolyn individually as characters before we get to know them as a couple. The fact that we know where they are in their lives and what they need in a relationship, as well as how susceptible they are to messing things up, deepens our investment in their story. But after the groundwork is laid in the first episode — Carolyn is self-determined; John is at a loss — subsequent events don’t deepen those characterizations as much as reinforce them. They react to what happens to them: John doesn’t actively pursue or push Daryl away; she leaves and comes back, twice, on her own. Carolyn fights for her career but simply runs into Michael all the time. Here’s hoping that their coming together will push these depictions further and reveal some more of what’s underneath.
• Some moments between Caroline and Jackie are worth noting. In episode two, Jackie tells Caroline that she more than exceeded her own mother’s expectations that she would become “the most beautiful accessory to the most coveted man.” But when Jackie tells Caroline — like she tells John — that every Kennedy marriage is a trade-off, Caroline is less willing to simply accept it as truth. She’s happy with her husband, Edwin Schlossberg (Ben Shenkman), whom she married despite Jackie’s reservations. Kelly would do well to study the kind of subtle resistance that Gummer puts up here; even if John was less self-assured, Caroline’s reactions seem more alive.
• There was an opportunity to get deeper into John’s attempts at self-determination through George. At Panna II, Carolyn asks John what he would do if he had free reign. He tells her he’d like to be an actor, though his mother (once again) intervened on that path. George would become an influential glossy and a point of pride for John-John. We miss the opportunity to learn more about how it came about in that two-year time jump.
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